The use of card processing equipment for processing plastic cards is known. In such equipment, a plastic card to be processed is input into the processing equipment, at least one processing operation is performed on the input card, and the card is then output from the processing equipment. The processing operation(s) performed on the plastic card by known processing equipment includes one or more of printing, laminating, magnetic stripe encoding, programming of a chip embedded in the card, and the like.
The processing equipment is often configured in the form of a desktop unit which, to limit the size of the unit, typically perform only one processing operation on the plastic card, although the equipment may perform multiple card processing operations. An example of a popular desktop plastic card processing unit is a desktop plastic card printer which performs monochromatic or multi-color printing on a card that is input into the printer.